unfake.js

This is a classic problem for people who didn't grow up making 8-bit pixel art. Typing "pixel art" into Nano-Banana only creates the illusion of pixel art, which quickly breaks down under modest scrutiny, particularly at larger resolutions. That's why you can see "smeared edges," "fringing," etc. Even a basic nearest neighbor downscale/upscale would have squashed some of the higher frequency noise. OP: Look into palette reduction and pixel grids. This is a decent start as a post-processing tool for this stuff. https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

> Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites. It’s really not. That's actually a pet peeve of mine as someone who used to spent a lot of time messing with pixel art in Aseprite. Nobody takes the time to understand that the style of pixel art is not the same thing as actual pixel art. So you end up with these high-definition, high-resolution images that people try to pass off as pixel art, but if you zoom in even a tiny bit, you see all this terrible fringing and fraying. That happens because the palette is way outside the bounds of what pixel art should use, where proper pixel art is generally limited to maybe 8 to 32 colors, usually. There are plenty of ways to post-process generative images to make them look more like real pixel art (square grid alignment, palette reduction, etc.), but it does require a bit more manual finesse [1], and un

Nice job. FYI there have been a couple of attempts at an RTS LLM Arena with varying degrees of success. Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149586 Show HN: RTS for Agents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649853 And of course there's a ton of research into more traditional forms of AI playing RTS games such as Alphastar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software) Feedback: That percussive sound that starts the song at the beginning of Play is SUPER jarringly loud. I'd trim it out of the track entirely. I know you've mentioned tileset improvements but just to put it out there you've generated isometric buildings, but the tile set you're using appears to be square based. This creates a very incongruous style where the buildings don't feel like they're actually attach

You still have to do some post-processing work around NB, since you’ll often end up with non-aligned pixel blocks, much higher color depth, and so on. I actually did some testing of spritesheeting with Nano Banana Pro a while back: https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js: https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

Did you ever consider using something like https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js/ in your process, to make it more proper-pixel-art? Maybe to process the Nano-Banana generated dataset before fine-tuning, and then also to fix the generated Qwen output?

Nice job! I also did some pixel art experiments several weeks ago with grid-based constraints via Img2Img with Gemini 3.0 Pro that might be of some interest: https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites FYI there are several nice tools for quantizing to a grid as well as reducing to a smaller discrete color palette that I recommend using as well (unfake [1] and pixel-snapper [2]). [1] https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js [2] https://github.com/Hugo-Dz/spritefusion-pixel-snapper

Nice. There's a couple of these (unfake which uses pixel snapping/palette reduction, sd-palettize which uses k-means to palette reduce, etc.) that I've used in the past in a Stable Diffusion -> Pixel Art pipeline. I think it'd be worth calling out the differences. [1] - https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js [2] - https://github.com/Astropulse/sd-palettize

Related: I know that many people use AI image generators to make pixel art, and recently I've stumbled upon a great tool to make a proper pixelart based on AI generated input see https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js and live demo on https://jenissimo.itch.io/unfaker (disclaimer: I don't know the author, just thought I'd share as I find it amazing)